Keith Wechsler

Sr. Software Engineer

I just completed the first project in the #JavaScript30 training course offered by Wes Bos. He provides free access to 30 videos, starter files, and assets to “build 30 things in 30 days with 30 tutorials” using nothing but plain JavaScript. In the first project, he walks you through building a “drum kit” in your browser. Since most of my HTML/JavaScript experience is with line of business apps in a corporate setting, I had never used the audio HTML tag before. I enjoyed Wes’ presentation style and he may very well end up with another paying customer for his other courses.

The “drum kit” was a fun project and I’m looking forward to working on the other 29. Wonder what’s next???

I was talking with a friend today about working on my blog this weekend and how it was hosted on Github using Github Pages. I told him that I would send him an e-mail with info on how to setup a site and I decided instead to create this post to document the steps I took. Hopefully it may help others who are attempting to do the same thing.

I recently discovered that the files I need to create a post on this site had been lost. Not only that, but pulling down the repo from my bitbucket repo didn’t help. Some of the critical files were not stored in the repo. So, I’ve spent most of this weekend recreating the site and I took notes of the process and included some documentation to help with maintaining a Hexo site.

A friend of ours called and asked my wife, Debbie, if we had a Raspberry Pi and knew how to use it. Her son had a project due for school and needed to control about 20 LEDs - sequencing when they were on and off. I had all of the hardware because I had played around with an Arduino and had bought some electronics parts that would be needed - breadboard, LEDs, resistors, and wires. I had also purchased a Pi Cobbler Plus Breakout board to simplify connecting the Pi. The only thing I had really done with the Pi to this point was copying the Raspian OS to an microSD memory card and booting the Pi. Time for me to learn some Python and put the Pi to work.

Like most people in my profession, I spend most of my waking hours behind a desk - normally 8+ hours at the office and 2-3 hours at home each evening. I’ve suffered with lower back pain for a number of years and have recently switched to using a sit-stand desk both at work and at home to help alleviate some of the pain and stiffness.

Today, our bodies are breaking down from obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, depression, and the cascade of health ills and everyday malaise that come from what scientists have named sitting disease.

I have spent the last couple of weeks going through the “AngularJS: Get Started” course produced by Scott Allen at Pluralsight. It is a beginner-level course that walks you through the process of creating your first AngularJS single page application (SPA). If you are familiar with creating a web page, and have some basic knowledge of JavaScript programming, you should be able to walk through the example with Scott and produce your own copy of the application.